OKRs amplify good culture, expose bad culture

I say OKRs are more of a vitamin, they're not a medicine. So, if you take OKRs and you're like, 'Oh, this will fix everything that's wrong with you.' No, that's not going to happen. It's just going to reveal everything that's wrong with your company.

For me, there are three things that really matter about a good OKR, and one is legibility. People look at it and understand what it is... I think actionability, I want OKR to inspire action... And the third one is authenticity, which is, does this actually, honestly depict what you're doing, what you're trying to do on a day-to-day basis?

No matter what you call it, there are three things that really matter about a good OKR: legibility - people understand what it is; actionability - it inspires action; and authenticity - does this honestly depict what you're doing on a day-to-day basis?

Sometimes you're just, I'm just trying to make the experience better. And sure, I can come up with this BS way to measure what that looks like, but that's not what I'm thinking about every day, anyway. So it just seems very performative, and there's just a lot of work that goes into it.

When you're working on a core experience, sometimes you're just trying to make the experience better. Sure, I can come up with this BS way to measure what that looks like, but that's not what I'm thinking about every day anyway. So OKRs just seem very performative.

Either you come up with some secondary metric that nobody actually cares about, or you anchor on business goals that you can't actually prove you moved. So either you anchor something that matters but you can't move, or something you can move but doesn't actually matter.

OKRs will not work. Why not? So, fundamentally, OKRs are a way to think about objectives and key results, but the fundamental assumption here is that it is solving for a kind of user, and that kind of user, you can divide and conquer. But if it is working for three different kinds of users, then all the goals will all the time be in conflict with each other.